Columbia Energy Exchange: Senator Alan Armstrong on Building American Energy Infrastructure

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Show notes (from RSS)

As the demand for power surges across the US, the debate over how to build energy infrastructure has reached a fever pitch. And while both sides of the aisle broadly agree that the current permitting process is broken, turning that consensus into actual ​legislation remains a challenge. So how do we define permitting reform, what does meaningful progress actually look like, and where do we stand today? 

Alan Armstrong is keenly focused on those questions. After spending his entire career in the energy industry, he was sworn into the US Senate in March, representing Oklahoma. (Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt appointed him after Markwayne Mullin resigned to become US secretary of Homeland Security. Per Oklahoma law, Armstrong cannot run for reelection.) Senator Armstrong spent 15 years as CEO of Williams Companies, one of the largest natural gas infrastructure firms in North America. He is also the former chair of the National Petroleum Council and a founding member of Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future.

Last week, Jason Bordoff spoke with Senator Armstrong about his legislative focus: permitting reforms aimed at streamlining energy buildouts. They discussed a bill that the senator has sponsored, the American Energy and Mineral Infrastructure Act of 2026, as well as the broader wave of reform efforts drawing bipartisan attention. The senator reflected on his time at Williams and how that informed his view on permitting policy. They discussed the role of judicial review, the power dynamic between federal and state regulators, and how growing energy affordability concerns are adding new pressure to pass meaningful permitting reform.

Credits: Hosted by Jason Bordoff and Bill Loveless. Produced by Mary Catherine O'Connor, Caroline Pitman, and Kyu Lee. Engineering by Gregory Vilfranc.

Transcript

Senator Alan Armstrong: The moderate Dems. I'm telling you, there's very little of that group that says, hey, we shouldn't like, if you sit down and say, you know, this is the process we started off with, which was kind of the principles of permitting. And we said, if we can come up with a bilk that can accomplish these things. Are you on board with this? Because it's not motherhood and apple pie, but it's close.

Jason Bordoff: As the demand for power surges across the United States, the debate over how we build energy infrastructure has reached a fever pitch. And while both sides of the aisle broadly agree that our current permitting process is broken, turning that consensus into actual legislation remains a challenge. Joining us today is someone who brings a unique perspective to that energy debate. After nearly 40 years at Williams, 15 as CEO, Alan Armstrong was recently appointed to the US Senate representing Oklahoma. Now sitting in a policy role, he's advocating for measures to streamline energy buildouts, part of a broader wave of permitting reform efforts drawing bipartisan attention. So how do we define permitting reform? What does meaningful progress actually look like? Where do we stand today? Can lawmakers find common ground around the projects they want to see built? What role should the federal government play? And what role belongs to the states? And how does a former energy CEO navigate the sudden shift from corporate leadership to the Senate floor? This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I'm Jason Bordeaux. Today on the show, Senator Alan Armstrong. Senator Armstrong is the junior US Senator from Oklahoma, a Republican who was appointed after Mark Wayne Mullen resigned to become Secretary of Homeland Security. Senator Armstrong has never held elected office before his appointment, having spent his entire career at Williams Companies, one of the largest natural gas infrastructure companies in North America. He's also the former chair of the National Petroleum Council and a founding member of Natural Allies for a Clean Energy Future. In our conversation, Senator Armstrong reflects on his time at Williams and explains how the legislation he has introduced draws on that firsthand experience to reshape federal permitting policy. We dive into the role of judicial review, the power dynamic between federal and state regulators, and how growing energy affordability concerns are adding new, new pressure to pass meaningful permitting reform. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Bill Loveless: Senator Alan Armstrong, wonderful to see you again. Thank you for making time to be on Columbia Energy Exchange.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Glad to be here.

Bill Loveless: Thanks, Chase in this one. Thank you for hosting me in the Capitol in this great studio. So quite an upgrade from how we normally do these. Very nice studio and nice to do these in person. They happen a lot More by zoom now. So, thanks. We're here in your new offices in the Hart Senate Office building. So how are you settling in? What's it like to be a Senator versus a CEO?

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah, well, let's. Very different. You know, I've been here since kind of the March 22, I think, so been here a while now. It's very different, you know, I mean, but the good news is it's a kind of new challenge, new set of, you know, skill sets. I'd been CEO for almost 15 years and so that kind of starts to, you know, kind of be a lot of the same old same old.

Bill Loveless: Had you ever thought about public office before?

Senator Alan Armstrong: No, no, never any interest. And I always thought about how bad I would be at it and how different the skill sets that I've seen for elected officials be different than my own. So I'm certain that the only way I was ever going to be one was to be kind of strong armed into it. But it's been a great opportunity, very thankful actually for Governor Stitt's selection. My litmus test on is like, well would I rather not, you know, if I just said no? And the answer is no. I'm glad. I'm honored to have the opportunity and it is very challenging. Different set of skill sets. But I'm also learning a lot of different things. So it's actually a pretty cool thing to step from being exec CEO and then exec chair for Williams. Cause I'm not sure that transition would have been all that smooth for me. So this has been really nice to have something else to kind of engage my brain on. So overall I'm very pleased with.

Bill Loveless: You've been connected to government and public policy. Obviously any CEO in the energy sector in particular needs to be. But even beyond what would be necessary with chairing the National Petroleum Council and things like that, is there anything that has surprised you or that's unexpected for what you have found in the federal policy world?

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah, you know, I think I thought that you would just come here and you would collect thoughts and ideas, put a really good bill together and it would be kind of a competition of which was most important bill and you know, ones that had adequate support. So I guess I expected a little more meritocracy as it relates to how bills get advanced in the quality of

Bill Loveless: the ideas and the proposals, quality of

Senator Alan Armstrong: the ideas and the importance of the ideas. And that is not the case.

Bill Loveless: What's the reality?

Senator Alan Armstrong: The reality is there's just, you know, there's an effort by the minority to just constantly jam up the schedule and take the floor time up. Have you realized how much, I mean people see all this voting going on and you know, so much of it is completely inconsequential voting on nominees. And it's silly to me that you take up this huge body of people here in the Senate that are, I mean it's amazing amount of talent around these places and people that are really dedicated to the country, they're not doing these jobs for money and they're just

Bill Loveless: talking about the members. You mean the staff.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Staff and everybody. Yeah, I mean there's just, I mean it's amazing the amount of talent that exists around here and, and yet so much of the time on the floor, time gets tied up by very inconsequential issues versus really meaty important topics for our country. And so that's been very surprising to

Bill Loveless: me and I've heard you on other conversations like this one, observe that you find Congress often prioritizes sort of partisan wins over long term problem solving.

Senator Alan Armstrong: For sure.

Bill Loveless: I imagine that has been a source

Senator Alan Armstrong: of frustration for sure. Just really surprising to me. I mean, and it's almost, it's become cultural. You know, it's, if it wasn't cultural, people would kind of say it under their breath and they might act that way, but they wouldn't say it out loud. And it's, you know, very normal for people to kind of. Well, of course I'm doing it that way because that's what it's going to take to get reelected or that's what it's going to take for a party to get reelected. So, you know, I think it's just become kind of the norm, unfortunately. And I would expect that, you know, more in the, in the House with the Representative because they're constantly in an election cycle and you know, and I would kind of expect that. But in the Senate it's, you know, that's alive and well too. So anyway, that's disappointing. I mean, people kind of laugh at me, you know, when they hear me talking, talk virtuously about why aren't we just here doing what's best for the American people. And people kind of just realize how naive I am when I say stuff like that, but I still keep saying it.

Bill Loveless: And do you feel, cause you have said I'm here for a short period of time, do you feel more free to just put all that aside and focus on what you're trying to do?

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah, I for sure do. But with that, I mean, the good news is when you're short term and you're not running, you got plenty of freedom to do what you think is right, but it doesn't lessen the burden of the time frame that's tied up by that. And it certainly doesn't take away the way things done around here, which is, you know, through committees and. Lots of other things that stand in the way of really getting to what's most important for the country. So, I mean, there's not very many people on either side of the aisle that will tell you they don't think permitting reform is extremely important and that it's really something we ought to get to and that we've got a short window to get it done. There's very few people that will say that. And I would suggest that there is a limited. Other than the fact that people are used to negotiating so much with each other and make sure the other side doesn't get a win, there's not that much argument about what needs to be reformed in terms of permitting. It's really. I mean, there's a few sticky issues around the edge, but most of it isn't really an argument about what's best. Most of it's an argument about, am I going to make it look like you got to win versus I got to win? So that's kind of surprising to me sometimes.

Bill Loveless: Yeah. So I guess let's jump in and talk about what that looks like. I mean, as you said, there's not many people in an era of abundance and data centers, and we have to build and we need more energy, and that's a competitive economic issue for the country, a security issue for the country. Not many people who disagree we need to do that better than we have in the past. There also doesn't seem to be that many people are super optimistic it's gonna get done this year. Maybe I'm wrong. Tell me if I'm wrong. But why is that? Where's the disconnect between the importance of it and what we're able to do?

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah, you know, again, I think part of it is there's a perception from the Democrats that there's no reason for them to do anything that would be positive. You know, here, ahead of the midterms, the narrative of, gosh, you know, the Republicans, the GOP and the Senate have gotten nothing done here in the last year. You know, it's just something that, you know, people want to harp on. But it's so. That's such un. That is so unfair to Thune and Barrasso. From my perspective, I think they do an amazing job, but it's hard to do anything if the other side is just saying, yeah.

Bill Loveless: And to be fair, that might look opposite, for sure.

Senator Alan Armstrong: I don't even. I don't even say that really, as. No, I would tell you. I actually, I've been very impressed with John Thune in particular as a leader, that I really do think he tries to put the country first, and I've been extremely impressed by that. He doesn't seem to waver on that principle. He's got a lot of issues to deal with, you know, to try to see that happen. But, you know, he's pretty, I think, very straightforward and somebody that really cares about the country. So I'd be the last person I know right now in the Senate that would try to put blame on him because I've seen him stand up some pretty tough issues for what he thinks is the right thing for the country. So.

Bill Loveless: So when you said there's broad agreement on what that reform needs to look like, like, it is hard to build. We know it takes years and years to get projects done, from renewables and transmission to oil and gas pipelines. You were squarely in the midst of some of those midstream projects that got blocked before you took this role. And my sense is it's a. It's a pretty broad range of potential barriers at the federal, at the state, at the local level that make it hard to get stuff done. So when you say it's. There's pretty clear consensus on what the priorities should be, talk about what those priorities are.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Well, I mean, if you look at what really needs to get reshaped, it's really the. It's the environment that NEPA creates, that our NEPA laws today create, make it extremely ripe for litigation and to be able to hold up projects to take an approach of sue and settle and actually raise money and make money on the sue and settle approach. So it's not as much. The lot of times, I think people want to try to blame it on the federal agencies. And it's really not so much the federal agencies that are the problem, it's the litigation that they're faced with that causes them to have to be super careful about it. So I think taking on NEPA reform in a way that you deal with litigation and you make sure that it's actually, you know, only the parties that could be harmed that are actually, you know, have standing and importantly, changing some of the judicial standards. For instance, today in many of the statutes, it's arbitrary and capricious is the judicial standard. So if you're denied a certificate, a court has to find that a state agency was acting in an arbitrary and capricious manner. Well, that's really. If a general counsel for a department for a state environmental agency is doing their job at all, it's really hard to find, for sure. I mean, like. And mostly because they're not part of the overall 401. I'm sorry, they're not part of the overall EIS effort. The EIS environmental impact statement is supposed to be a process to wrestle with all the different constituents on what's the best route for this linear infrastructure, whether it's transmission line or pipeline, highway. The goal there is to say, let's get everybody, let's get everybody's vote on the table and let's find a way to make the most environmentally friendly route that we can find. The states have taken the approach that under the Clean Water act, particularly the 401 water quality certificate, that they don't have to be a part of that, that they can do their review after the EIS is completed. So if you think about the term arbitrary and capricious within that, you go into a process that says, let's figure out the very best route for this. And everybody's at the table. And there's all kinds of considerations. Communities, landowners, highway departments, species from both the state and the federal Fish and Wildlife. So you just, I mean, the list goes on and on and on for the number of agencies that are involved in this process. But to the degree that the state says, well, we, we're going to reserve our right under the 401 water quality certificate to not be part of the EIS. We'll only issue our EIS after the fact. They then can single out whatever their issue is that they've decided to come up with. They can single that out outside of the eis. So there may be very good reason for the state to say, well, we don't think you should cross the stream here. We think you should cross it over here. Even though the highway department in this other case said, no, you can't cross it there because we're going to be putting a new bridge through there, so you have to put it over here. Well, when the judge goes to look at that and state denies you and goes to look at that, the state says, I'm sorry. The judge says, well, wait a second, the state just had this requirement for you to move it, and that's all we can look at. We can't look at the underlying EIS process. So that is not arbitrary and capricious. And if you say, well, gosh, we can't move it there because this other issue exists, it doesn't make any difference. The court's only looking was the state being arbitrary and capricious and requiring that. So it causes a do loop where you have to go back to the start of the EIS and go through that all over again. And there's nothing that holds the state to saying that they like that route in the first place on the second go round. So it's really a process problem. It's not even, it's certainly not an environmental standards problem. There's not, nobody is coming at permitting reform saying, hey, we want to lessen, you know, the impact, we want to, you know, lessen the environmental requirements and conditions. That nobody is even thinking that. But, but the process does need to be fixed. So, so that's, that's a great example of how it's just process problem. It's not a, not a content or an environmental protection issue.

Bill Loveless: You're describing that problem of the state review in sort of abstract terms and I don't remember every detail, but you're describing a circumstance related perhaps to New York State and a high profile pipeline that you were trying to build.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Sure, sure.

Bill Loveless: Is that story you just told, your sense as CEO of Williams, of what happened?

Senator Alan Armstrong: I'm not going to pin down the details of that, but it is an example. It's an example and it's happened multiple times. I mean, people don't even realize how many times this happens and you get, you know, rung around and you can't really go make it public. You just make things worse. Especially when the state has all the cards in their hands. You really don't win anything by, you know, calling them out on this stuff because at the end of the day you still have to get a permit, so, and a certificate in that case.

Bill Loveless: So, so what is the role of states and the rights for states to have a say in what infrastructure they want to build and how they want to build it and the 250 streams that the Constitution was crossing or whatever? I presume you think states have a role to play.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Absolutely. And my position is that a few things on this one, they ought to be part of the overall EIS process. So it ought to be a concurrent review with the EIS and all agents. I mean, we need one lead federal agency. In this case it would be the ferc, but we need one lead federal agency that you either opt in to be a part of the EIS or you waive your rights to take issue so that first and foremost. Secondly, though, there does need to be standards for water quality established. And so today the state can arbitrarily change those water quality standards however they choose. So you would think that was pinned down. It's not. So making sure that there's standards that are consistent with the 300 series in the Clean Water act, which actually describes the standards for water quality issues, is a second thing. So setting standards and then third, making sure that the judicial standard under which you could take on that a state has to have reasonable and compelling evidence that there's actually going to be harm to the environment. And don't forget the Corps of Engineers also does their full study on the same exact issue. So you talk about overlap between the states and the feds. The corps does their own study under the 404 permit. They do their own study on water quality impact as well. So this is not like a process where we're saying, hey, let's really straighten this out to where there's only one agency, like only one look at this. Having a state and a fed look at the. And the state and fed. It goes through everything, it's species. I mean if you look at the duplicate of agencies between state and fed, and we're only saying we're not even trying to straighten that out, we're simply saying they all need to be brought into the same concurrent process.

Bill Loveless: So that's the Clean Water Act. Just you said there's one of the top line bullets of the main points of when people talk about permitting requirements.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah. So judicial standards under nepa, which we talked about a little bit, but making sure this arbitrary and capricious language is not a loophole. And in most cases that arbitrary and capricious language needs to be changed.

Bill Loveless: Second, sorry, just on that point, are you talking about timelines for judicial review or are you talking about seven counties in the scope of the review, what

Senator Alan Armstrong: should be in place?

Jason Bordoff: No.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Well, that too. So there's a lot of judicial reform in our bill that we laid out. There is a lot of judicial review changes in NEPA and but none of it is in any way, shape or form unfair. It just creates certainty. But another issue along the same lines on NEPA is making sure that a court's, the judicial branch and the executive branch are limited to not being able to vacate a lawfully issued certificate. And that is a huge issue. It's big for the transmission developers, it's big for winds, big for Offshore winds big for pipelines. And in fact, you know, when I was at Williams, we did have the Regional Energy Access which was a billion dollar project that went from Pennsylvania into New Jersey. Project was finished, it was up and operating and the D.C. circuit vacated our certificate. And so thank goodness the FERC, you know, gave us an emergency and we eventually won that. But that's scary for a company that's in the business of building pipelines.

Bill Loveless: And how should that work? Assuming one thinks there needs to be judicial review, agencies might make mistakes things there is a role for judicial review. How do you get that balance right where companies know they can move forward, invest, maybe begin projects and you still are allowed to have judicial review?

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah, I think it's fine. I mean, you know, we certainly would suggest that, that there can be a remand and that the court has a right to remand the agency on what the answer they want but it shouldn't fall immediately to vacating the certificate. And that's, you know, that's what was wrong in this case. And this was fascinating because the claim was that the FERC not anything the company had done. So in other words, we, the operator and the people that made the investment did everything we were told to do, but that FERC hadn't done their job in analyzing the greenhouse gas emission study on it. That was the claim. So think about that situation where you've got one branch of the government telling the other branch of the government they didn't do their job. But the people that actually followed the law and made the investment are told tough, it's not your fault, but you still wasted a billion dollars.

Bill Loveless: That comes I think, tell me if I'm right to that. I mentioned the seven counties decision before. The idea that the Supreme Court has now said and your legislation I think is along these lines. NEPA review, environmental review should be about the immediate impacts of the project, not second and third order, not exactly.

Senator Alan Armstrong: And in fact there was no law on the greenhouse gas emissions. Why in the world the court agreed that there should have been when there wasn't any law on that is kind of fascinating to me. But anyway, that's the, you know that situation where you as the operator falling along lawfully what you were told to do and the US government tells the other US government wrong. But it wasn't the US government's money that got spent and wasted.

Bill Loveless: I think the reason I'm trying to get at is I think at a certain level, high enough level, this conversation feels like a no brainer abundance. We want to build things, we need energy to be cheap in this country. We need to meet rising power sector demand and win the competitive AI race with China. Permitting reform. And then when you get to the details, it's harder. Right. And there are real tensions. I just want to like, uncover some, what some of those are and how you respond to concerns.

Jason Bordoff: So.

Bill Loveless: And tell me if you agree, like judicial review may be one of the sharpest fault lines there, where when you hear concerns on the left and the environmental movement that, well, for too many, permitting reform means streamlining to the point of weakening environmental protections. They'll point to things like judicial review. So how do you.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Which is great. If somebody could actually point to a case where the company themselves either provided false information, they didn't comply with what they were told to comply, and that person came back and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hey, these guys lied to you in their certificate and it's their fault. But to say the government is the one that faulted, but it's your fault is completely out of line. And so, and in those cases, I mean, if there was, obviously, if there was some, you know, immediate physical harm that was done and there is, there is conditions around this, if there is known harm that can't be undone, then fine. But that's not the situation in these cases at all. And so, I mean, the good point is seven counties, I think, you know, really starts to put some guardrails around

Bill Loveless: and maybe just for people listening, you can remind them what the, the main finding there. The.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah, yeah. On seven counties. Yeah, yeah. So seven counties said one, you can't just make up new regs and requirements outside of what your specific agency is responsible for. Even though NEPA really, I mean, I was thrilled to see that. But, but in precedence over time, NEPA had become, well, yeah, you're over fishing wildlife, but you should have looked at this climate condition that's going to change things in 50 years. So that's kind of speculative impact in the future. Seven counties said, you can't look at that. You have to stay within your swim lanes of responsibility and you have to have evidence that there's actually going to be impact. And so I, I actually think it's a huge finding that's going to change things, you know, pretty dramatically for the future. But the, you know, I would say the judicial branch has done their job on this trying to clean that up. Legislators, we have not done our job on this. And there's more it, that, that is not seven counties isn't going to fix everything. You Know, but the point is, if

Bill Loveless: you're trying to build something like say an LNG export project, you would want to say what does it do to the environment, the wetlands that might be near in Louisiana or something. But the idea is some have, as we've seen, that, well, how much gas is exported? What does that do to the global price of gas? How. What does that do to demand for coal in Asia? What, that these are too far afield? Yeah, from the immediate project.

Senator Alan Armstrong: So it has to be specific to the project, has to be kind of immediate impact from that particular project. So that's a, that's a very big finding.

Bill Loveless: I saw that when I served in the first Obama term and the Keystone pipeline was the big political issue, the thousands of pages of environmental review there and a lot of questions about what it would mean for global oil markets and demand for alternatives and renewables. And there's a lot of analysis that has to go into thinking about that.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Right, right. And so it does become very speculative. And I've talked to Chris Wright since, you know, post the post the LNG halt that happened.

Bill Loveless: And this was Biden pausing new permits.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah, Biden and him going back and reviewing the actual documentation that was in, you know, within the confines of the doe. And the findings were actually very positive towards lng. And there was a whole host of scenarios that were studied, but the ones that were picked, which were kind of on a tail of overall studies are the ones that said you shouldn't do it. But the vast majority consensus scenarios said that LNG was actually beneficial.

Bill Loveless: Well, they put a big 600 page report out at the very end of the administration, which was a little hard to make your way through. But I wrote a piece after it came out saying federal law requires that you give a permit if it's not contrary to the national interest. You should look at what it means for the national interest and that might mean the environment, domestic gas prices. And actually their study found the impacts were pretty small on those things that they put out at the very end of the administration. But I guess I want to ask you what you said earlier, which is no one's trying to lessen environmental review, cut corners, weaken environmental protections, and where that becomes, how do you strike the right balance in practice to say permitting an environmental review need to be more efficient, more predictable, more timely. We can probably agree that environmental groups sometimes have used those processes not just to make sure an environmental process was followed, but to block a project entirely. And at the same time, there are projects that pose real environmental risks and I don't know what example one thinks of, from badger2medicine decades ago to pebble mine to, I don't know, pick a project that people think there's real environmental issues here that need to be looked at. And you want to prevent permitting environmental review from being a tool to indefinitely delay, but you want to make sure that you're not missing out on what this process was supposed to do, which is really uncover and surface real environmental risks that are applied here.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Well, completely agree. I think that our current processes are so distrusted at this point and people are so used to them just being political, that it's really hard to separate the wheat from the chaff in this process today. So when you really do have an environmental issue, it's really hard to know for the public today whether it is or not, because every single project, you know, has somebody opposing it. And so I would just say, I think that getting a process that lessens the amount of politicization of the answer, like the states being able to just arbitrarily come up with requirements, and then somebody saying that that violated environmental conditions. So, said another way, if we actually had stated environmental standards and you had a process that you went through that changing the standard is where we ought to be taking the time, and once the standards are set, then we ought to be able to build to them. But changing the standards on the fly in the middle of a project, which is the way a lot of this gets done today, that is really wrong. The pressure ought to be put on the agencies to establish good standards and give those standards time to exist and be understood by the market instead of right in the middle of a project. Hey, we just decided to change the standards. And you either spend this $100 million doing this new study, or we're not even going to allow your application to be complete. And that's the kind of stuff that goes on today. So I would just say I actually, you know, the good news is Williams, you know, where I was for 40 years, was a company that really, really tried to do things right. Joe Williams, who was CEO there for a long time. I don't know how many times I got asked, what are we doing to make sure we left the place better than when we started. And he was a very big believer in that. And so I kind of grew up in that culture, and I saw how many huge opportunities there were to help actually help the environment because of the amount of money that we were spending. But if we were allowed to spend the money in the litigation fight and the value that gets destroyed these days. If we were allowed to spend that money on mitigation to actually improve the environment, I actually think that we could, that the process would actually allow us to improve the environment. But today it's just a fist fight. We had a Transco, had a project one time, it was going through the north north mountains in Georgia and there was an old railroad tunnel there that was kind of Civil War era railroad tunnel and it was out of service and we found it in our survey and we thought this is perfect. We're not going to have to deforest. We'll be able to lay the pipeline through this area and we won't have to deforest and we can lay the pipeline through the tunnel. And we were working with the state to make that happen, Went in and did a species test and we found a lot of bats in that tunnel. Wound up, the bats had fungus, typical white ear or white nose fungus. And so the answer was, you can't go through there because you're going to affect these bats. And we said, whoa, whoa, whoa, what if we were to work with Georgia State University on developing a fungicide and actually see if we can help the bat colony instead of denying us? Because at the end of the day we put our pipeline through here, it's not going to affect this bat colony once it's installed. So we actually got to that point, State was very cooperative. I was like, wow, I love being a part of this company. I love our environmental scientists that come up with these solutions. What a cool deal. Sierra Club showed up and started raising all kinds of cane about it and were threatening to shut down the project. The state of Georgia, the fish and wildlife for the state of Georgia told them to cease and assist and get out of their hair. This is how it's supposed to be done. And it made me very proud to see that we can find great environmental solutions if we're working together in an honest way to accomplish that. So I actually feel like if we would clean our processes up that we could get very quickly to much better mitigation answers than we do today. Because the process that we have today, it's not actually protecting the environment. The fact that you have a do loop on a process instead of forcing a concurrent process that is not improving environmental protections. So I'd be the first to admit I'm probably biased and jaded from the seat I've sat in on that topic. But I am 100% convinced that the process can be improved without detracting from environmental protection.

Bill Loveless: And I Think you've said you wanted to see a greater role for FERC as a federal agency to coordinate and does that. My question for you is given other things the Supreme Court has done, like the leadership of these agencies can be more political now, not necessarily independent agencies. Does that, does that create a new problem?

Senator Alan Armstrong: I think there's risk. But like I've said all along, like, I mean, I don't know how many people have said, oh, you don't want that to happen because then we've already had that and if the FERC is politicized, they can stop the project anyway.

Bill Loveless: And do you think states, if it, you're sort of saying they're pointing to issues with the Clean Water act and using it, I think putting words in your mouth, paraphrasing like as an excuse because they don't want this project at all. Should states just have the right to think differently about oil and hydrocarbon infrastructure projects, the importance they place on climate change? We want to lead on climate change, so we don't want to allow those projects.

Senator Alan Armstrong: No, I don't think so. I mean, I think as long as there's, that's why we have interstate commerce. So, no, I don't think they ought to be able to dictate. I mean, if they want to go be able to elect at a federal level to get the right people elected to make law about carbon tax and a really sensible approach to managing carbon, then great, but managing it through the permitting process is a very poor idea.

Bill Loveless: So where do you see, I mean this. If we're talking about oil and gas pipelines disproportionately, but obviously the difficulty with permitting and the reliability of permits, making sure they're not going to get pulled, as we saw with equinor and offshore wind or other things. This is about renewables. It's about oil and gas. Where's the scope for bipartisan compromise here that allows this to move forward?

Senator Alan Armstrong: I think it's, you know, I think it's pretty strong. And the good news is what's different this time around is that the industries have come together on this. And this has been my pitch to industry for quite some time, which is we can sit when I was on the industries, we can keep pointing our fingers at the politicians for being so partisan, but until we come together and say, hey, we need sighting for any and all kinds of linear infrastructure and we don't want the permitting process to be citing winners and losers on that, the siting of the infrastructure should not be trying to make law around what Fuel sources we're going to use in our country. If you want to make those, go win the elections and change the law. But it shouldn't be through the permitting siting. And I think industry has actually come together on that. When we rolled our bill out, we had ACOR there, we had hydropower there. So transmission, industrial power transmission developers were there. So we've really worked hard to try to build a bill that is good for mining, it's good for power transmission developers, it's good for renewables. And we're not trying to make winners and losers in this bill. And I do think that's what's changed, because last time around with epra, you know, it was a pretty good fight that went on between industries on that about who the winners and losers were. And I think this time around, industry is speaking with a much more constructive and consolidated voice.

Bill Loveless: So where do you see the fault lines when you get in the members elevator and someone you can name them if you want says, that's a terrible idea, I can never support that. What are the concerns?

Senator Alan Armstrong: You know, the primary fault lines are the folks that, and I'm not going to name names here, but the primary are the people that draw a lot of their support from NGOs, and the NGOs, you know, are not willing to. Some of them are. I mean, there's some moderate ones that are being constructive and responsible. There's others that like, definitely don't want to see litigation reform in NEPA because it's their livelihood. And there's ones that don't want to see the Clean Water act issues resolved because it's been their tool of choice for quite some time. So mostly it is just people that have that as their primary source and base. Those are main other the moderate Dems. I'm telling you, there's very little of that group that says, hey, we shouldn't like. If you sit down and say, this is the process we started off with, which was kind of the principles of permitting. And we said, can you agree on this? If we can come up with a bill that can accomplish these things, are you on board with this? Because it's not motherhood and apple pie, but it's close and people have gotten on board with these principles and the bill that we rolled out very much sticks to these principles. And so I think, because the industry in general is speaking, for instance, a great example, the 401 water quality certificate's always been considered to be a pipeline issue because it's been used over and over and over to Stop pipelines. The only reason it hadn't been stopped use transmission lines. Even those several states, Arkansas, Missouri, both stopped. Two really big important transmission lines that would have connected excess wind power in Texas and Kansas into the TVA Tennessee Valley Authority market were stopped by the states mostly because the developers didn't have federal eminent domain rights to push through those states if they got imminent domain the way all the new transmission bills are trying to be done right now by the Democrats. All of those bills would require federal backstopping authority. So in other words, if state stopped, you would have the ability to go to the FERC and gain federal eminent domain if it was deemed necessary and good for the public, in the public's best interest so that the 401 issue will become a red state weapon on transmission if you give federal siting authority. Your question to me, well, shouldn't the state just be able to stop you? Well, if they do, they'll be able to stop transmission too. And obviously that doesn't make sense for our country. That's, I think, really a winning argument that's worked for us with the transmission developers. You know, folks like Nextera have been great supporters on this. They see these issues from all sides. They talk about building all kinds of different infrastructure. They've been involved in all kinds of different infrastructure and they see this as important on that front. So it's great to have people that have been there in the trenches and kind of seen these speaking and helping us bring support to both sides of the aisle.

Bill Loveless: Since this is audio, I will let everyone listening know what you put in front of me. Which are your policy principles to get America building again? The approach must be energy source neutral. No subsidies, explicit or implied. No single state veto of a federal license project, a single efficient federal review process overseen by a lead agency. No degradation of environmental protection. And then lawfully issued final permits have to be durable and respected. Most of those seem pretty common sense. Can I ask you about the subsidies? One, because you mentioned earlier, if you want to make policy, one direction or another, climate policy, have a carbon tax, have a maybe a clean energy tax credit. Does that violate the idea that you're talking about from the permitting?

Senator Alan Armstrong: I'm from a permitting. This is the whole issue. And it's interesting that you ask that question because it tells us how confused we've gotten about what permitting ought to do. I mean, this is for the siting of infrastructure. This isn't deciding bigger important things about energy use and climate change and those kind of things. So we've gotten used to the permitting process, trying to be the relegator of what it shouldn't be.

Bill Loveless: Do you think if an administration offers a billion dollar payment to not develop a leasehold for federal offshore wind that that's a kind of wrong subsidy to achieve a permitting outcome?

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah, I certainly don't think that. I mean, you know, I think we need, right now, I think we need all forms of energy, frankly. So I wasn't involved in that. Don't know the details of that. But in general, I think we should be trying to. If somebody's going to invest and it's not going to be subsidized in those cases, if it's by utility and they're building the rate base with it,

Bill Loveless: you

Senator Alan Armstrong: can question whether or not that's subsidized or not, as you know, and you know how that works as well as I do and why utilities often support that approach. But nevertheless, we're not going to fix state utility regs, you know, within the process that we have. That's up for a state utility to decide if they think that's a reasonable way to just generate their power. But, but it's, Yeah, I, I don't disagree with you at all that those kind of things, you know, we ought to be encouraging and enabling. And so anyone puts, wants to put their money at risk as a developer, A developer, let's, let's hope that happens. You know, we're gonna, if we keep going on the path, where aren't we're gonna be having to beg people to put their money up?

Bill Loveless: Has this AI and data center issue changed the conversation around permitting reform?

Senator Alan Armstrong: It's interesting to me how many people want to see those two things divorced. And I don't think they are divorced practically.

Bill Loveless: I mean, we need a lot more power. Right. Power generation's growing.

Senator Alan Armstrong: It's the same issue. Right. It's a NIMBY banana. I don't know if you saw Jane Kleeb with Bold alliance came out last week in a Politico article and said that, that it's never been so easy to be relevant as it is now in fighting data centers.

Bill Loveless: Right. Not just the energy, the power, renewables or transmission or whatever. You're talking about the data center.

Senator Alan Armstrong: The data center itself. That has never been so easy to be relevant in her industry of stopping projects.

Bill Loveless: There's a lot of opposition.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah. She also said that she's been doing this for 20 years and it's just gotten easier and easier to block projects instead of build projects. And that's, you know, I mean, that's her business. So, you know, that's unfortunate for the rest of us, but that's such a, that should scare us as Americans when we're in a race right now to be able to have the best computing power in the world, that really ought to scare us. That's such a vulnerability for our country in this war that we're in. So. And I don't mean the Iran war, I mean just in general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, that really is concerning to me and I think if our permitting processes don't help enable projects versus disabled projects, our goal ought to be to get as much capital as we can invested into low cost infrastructure and low cost energy infrastructure as we can. I mean, the US Government and the citizens of our country would be better off if the energy infrastructure business overbuilt itself. Because I remember those days. I remember when we could eke out a 9 or 10 return on a pipeline project. That, that was fantastic because everybody could build it. Now, when you're the incumbent, the kind of returns that you can extract today as an incumbent pipeline is really absurd because not because it's some great new technology, but because the past, because we're constraining new builds so bad. And like people want to think, oh gosh, you know, we really put it to the big bad energy company. Well, you really didn't. You really just put it to the American consumer.

Bill Loveless: You mentioned before how, you know, you see opposition coming from NGOs that have an agenda to try to block oil and gas infrastructure. I'm curious how you would respond to those who might say, look, we know the world needs oil and gas today and you want that to be inexpensive for people because we have an affordability problem. But we're building pieces of infrastructure that are there for decades and we want the world to look very different from that group's perspective in 10 or 20 years than it does today. We want to be using less oil and gas than we are today. And we're concerned about building infrastructure that takes decades to pay back an investor. Is that a valid concern?

Senator Alan Armstrong: Well, I'll roll the clock back to 2014, when Constitution Pipeline was first proposed. And it was, we don't want your cheap gas up here because we want to be invest, we want to be able to invest in higher cost renewables. That was the response I got actually from Governor Deval Patrick in Massachusetts at the time. And so, well, let's roll the clock forward now. So it's now been 12 years. What has New England done? They've just burned more fuel oil. More and more and more fuel oil. And so to say that you're saving the planet by cutting yourself off from economic choices, eventually they're going to fix that problem because there's not going to be any demand up there. I mean, there, I mean, like, I think it's kind of funny that Governor Hochul came out against data centers in New York and I'm like, you already solved that problem by stopping energy development in your state. You didn't really need to be.

Bill Loveless: But it's changed your position on some of these gas pipelines, right?

Senator Alan Armstrong: Well, or not, I'm not. I mean, didn't change your mind on Constitution. So, so I think that. But my point is that we've been saying this for a long time, and as long as the alternative is we're going to burn more fuel oil is the answer. Or we're going to say, well, we're going to use offshore wind and it's going to be 9 cents a kilowatt hour. So that's the reason our utility prices are higher, because they won't let us build these $0.09 kilowatt hour the same. I mean, the problem is not when we have cost of power is cheap. When there's plenty of power, cost of gas is cheap in New England when there's plenty of gas, it's in peak times that causes the price surges up there. And so to not build natural gas to be the backup as we build out renewables over time is kind of crazy to me. It's like, if you really are that concerned about climate change, why wouldn't you want the next 10 years to save that fuel oil? Like what? Like if you really think it's that important, then it's kind of the time value of the climate, you know, and so that, that to me is kind of, I, I've kind of given up on people being really honest about that when there's so much reduction in fuel oil in the Northeast to be taken out of the markets. And so that's why I don't really don't take that comment all that serious anymore.

Bill Loveless: I just want to make sure we covered all the bases and what you think the key priorities for this umbrella called permitting reform is. It seems to mean different things to different people. So that's what I just want to ask. But you talked about clean Water Act 401, judicial review timeline. I think for judicial.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Judicial review, judicial standards vacature. So on both.

Bill Loveless: Sanctity of permits.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Sanctity of permits. Right. Is key. Issue there. And then on the fringes of that, like in our bill, we have the Cortez Masto mining, which we think is really well written. And a lot of our bill actually took a lot of great work that's been done in the House. The House has done a lot of really good work on this front and we've adopted a lot of the things that came out of the House into a comprehensive bill. That sounds really easy, but it's not. You have to kind of weave all those different permits together and the team's done a really nice job of doing that, but those are kind of the major issues. But you also have things like NHPA and other things like that that have to be considered as well. What we didn't take on was we didn't take on cost allocation on electric transmission, not because we don't think that's going to have to be solved, but we've been hoping to adopt alongside ours a Dem side transmission bill. And so we've been working to try to accomplish that.

Bill Loveless: You talked about how the constraint on building new infrastructure, say oil and gas pipelines, is sort of a gift. I'm paraphrasing to those who have the infrastructure today and the prices they can charge for it. Energy demand is growing in the U.S. power demand is growing for the first time in 20 years. Gas is a big part of that. We're using more gas for data centers, for power generation, for industry, and of course LNG exports. We're going to see a significant increase in what does that mean for the outlook for domestic gas markets. It's been striking how gas prices have barely gone up in the last few months with this Hormuz crisis when Asian and European LNG prices were near $20 per million BTU, it was less than $3 here. I think there's growing concern. Maybe that's not always going to be the case. We start to become more disconnected to these markets and maybe that's a concern for U.S. economic competitiveness. Do you share that concern?

Senator Alan Armstrong: I think it's certainly something to to keep your eye on and monitor. And I do think that we've been living off of the off gas bounty coming out of the Permian in terms of handling a lot of the growth. And the Haynesville growth has been pretty large where it's easy to build infrastructure. So I think the ease of building infrastructure out of those markets has kind of kept us in the situation where we have an abundance. But if we start to rely on other basins for gas supply, whether it's the Rockies or it's Marcellus and Utica. If we start to rely on those basins for our growth and we don't solve this infrastructure problem, that's where our problem's going to be. You know, Senator King from Maine has always been a really, you know, big student of this issue. And he's always, since when I was on the outside, he always pressed on me that, well, you can't tell me that we're not gonna outgrow if we export all the cell in G. You can't tell me we're not eventually going to put tons of pressure on price. And I've said, well, with all due respect, the New England has cut themselves off from low cost gas already. It isn't going to affect them because the thing that constraining them is having access to gas in the first place. So you won't even hardly be able to see it. When you're having to pay, you know, the kind of prices they're having to pay in the wintertime for their gas, you're not going to see much. Your issue is pipeline constraint. It's not wholesale gas price. And so I think that, and there's a lot of areas that, and it

Bill Loveless: could feed it indirectly to manufactured goods

Senator Alan Armstrong: and it's used in other places.

Bill Loveless: That's right.

Senator Alan Armstrong: That's right. Yeah. So I mean, I think it's, to answer your question, it could very well sneak up on us in terms of the demand. And I say that because I realize how much extraordinary amount of power generation, gas fired power generation that's being built for off grid power generation right now. And you know, it's not one project by itself, it's not all that big. But when you start adding it all up in terms of what all is getting built right now, it's a lot of gas demand that's continuing to come strong at this space. And we've gotten used to our gas industry being able to keep up with that. But we've been relying on two sources that I question will be able to carry us in the next wave of growth in terms of Permian off gas and the Haynesville growth. So I think if we've gotten used

Bill Loveless: to this unusual circumstance, which is when there's a shock in the Strait of Hormuz, oil prices go up around the world and gasoline prices go up in the US Even though we're an exporter now, not a big importer, gas markets haven't worked that way. We're sort of take that for granted and that's pretty significant advantage.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah, but I do think that the reserves are there to carry us for quite some time. But it's going to be a question of whether if we keep fighting ourselves on infrastructure over and over and we don't allow ourselves to access where we do have reserves, that's where it's going to be a problem. Because just because we can build pipelines in Texas and just because we can build pipelines in Louisiana and that's what's kind of kept us afloat when we have to start relying on other resource areas to help pick up the load, that's the piece that honestly concerns me.

Bill Loveless: I'm stepping back a little bit from permitting reform just in our final minutes, but we're talking about the outlook, the significant shift from the US importing 60% of its oil to being a net exporter. Export surge in the last few months to help the rest of the world. SPR release was a part of that. But there's growing concern that maybe at some point it's hard to keep growing a million barrels per day per year and the quality of the resource declines and the ability for technology to offset that declines, that maybe we're starting to see the shale boom plateau, maybe even decline. What's your sense of the outlook for US Oil and gas?

Senator Alan Armstrong: Well, I mean, I think as long as we get price signals, nothing's going to, to solve a problem where you, you know, take down the straight Hormuz and then the Houthis start taking out, you know, Red Sea export. So I like, you can't, you're not going to solve those problems. You know, in the short term, it's not, can't be a strong enough market signal to give us enough time to respond to that.

Bill Loveless: So although even there it's pretty remarkable that oil averaged $100 a barrel.

Senator Alan Armstrong: It's amazing to me that, that we kept that as under control as we did. But it does show that to a certain degree, we have a fairly elastic market. I question how much of that might have been China pulling back on both demand and using their storage.

Bill Loveless: You question meaning you're not sure they really did?

Senator Alan Armstrong: No, no, no. I think that one of the reasons we lived through that so is because China reduced imports. Right. And whether they did that through storage or they actually curtailed demand, I'm not, not sure about that, but certainly.

Bill Loveless: And they also restricted product export, so they reduced the refinery.

Senator Alan Armstrong: So how much of that they still have up their sleeve, you know, if this continues is questionable in my mind in terms of. For it really impact the rest of the Markets, but that's pretty noticeable. I mean, that definitely saved, I think, you know, helped save us from a. You know, pretty well.

Bill Loveless: We had five and a half million barrels a day of extra pipeline capacity because to your point about that infrastructure can help build resilience. Saudi Arabia and the UAE had been willing to pay an insurance premium in the form of pipelines that they only partially used for an event like this. Right, right. And then we had pretty healthy inventories.

Senator Alan Armstrong: How smart is that? You know, if you think about Germany, if Germany had built in advance, they had built the LNG import facilities, think about how cheap that would have been to have alternative infrastructure capacity versus being wed to one. So the concept of, gee, let's just build just enough infrastructure that we need is so foolish from a national perspective.

Bill Loveless: Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about that. But the question is the kind of society's willingness to pay an insurance premium, which is what it is to have some infrastructure on standby in case you need it.

Senator Alan Armstrong: But it's so cheap compared to all the other things that we do to protect ourselves from that. Like, like building that kind of infrastructure is.

Bill Loveless: And Europe did some of that in the third energy package with reverse flow capability. They created a more interconnected market to help cope with.

Senator Alan Armstrong: But like, you know, it's kind of like I always say this, it's like politicians and bridges. You know, when a bridge fails, it is everybody's fault except for the politician that ignored the report from the engineer for the last 20 years saying that the bridge was in danger and that the budget got pushed off to not go do that in the same ways for infrastructure. I mean, and if you look around right now and you see all of the reports from the ISOs and the RTOs saying that they're really tight on the reserve margins in their areas and they're going to have to have. People like politicians are so good at not paying attention to facts. It's just amazing to me there's some

Bill Loveless: pretty smart people in this building. Is that a lack of time? It's because they have 20 issues on their desk at any given moment.

Senator Alan Armstrong: They get by with focusing on the populist issues. And I think it's a product of the environment here. If people get by with doing it and the guy that wins is the guy that's a loudmouth that ignores the facts, but he's a loudmouth and he drives off the populist issues, then if that's who's winning, then that's so what's

Bill Loveless: helpful for people outside to do, to inform that process. If you're running a research institute that's trying to use evidence and facts as best we can, or a company or these advisory bodies like the National Patron Council that you led, what do you see as effective now that you're sitting in the seat receiving that information?

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah, it's a really good point. I think one of the things that's dawned on me here is that the committee leads here, the committee chairs and the ranking members here dictate a lot of the timing and sense of urgency and so forth on the plan. So I think, you know, understanding who's next in a chair, understanding what areas that you can really bring a sense of urgency to, you know, are really important, I think. You know, for instance, I will say one thing that happened, you know, that I thought was really interesting was when National Grid was trying to convince Governor Hochul that they really needed Williams Nessie Pipeline to serve the Brooklyn and Long island area, that expansion of that existing line, they brought her out to the facility and showed her that they were running 250 trucks around the city, diesel fired trucks around the city to move LNG to their town border delivery points to keep the city up. Like, this is how we're keeping this physically is how we're keeping our city up. And I think once they made that a little more, they'd been kind of bashful about wanting to rub anybody's nose in that. But I think once they made it public and people acknowledged it, it was pretty hard in that case for Governor Hochul to, you know, to deny that issue. So I think sometimes, you know, really getting people's kind of drug into the issue is helpful. I mean, in case of a bridge, if you go out and say, okay, I'm letting you know we have delayed, delivered a report to you showing you that this bridge could and will fail in the future if you don't do

Bill Loveless: something in terms of just bringing it to conclusion with maybe where we might be headed and what the opportunities are for progress, for bipartisan compromise, if that exists anymore. And again, you mentioned earlier what some of the obstacles are, including maybe not the more moderate Dems, if that's the right word, but those on the left who are just concerned about oil and gas infrastructure at all. On the other side, the idea that this is an administration that seems pretty unsupportive of renewables, particularly wind, solar to some extent, is that a significant obstacle? Do you see that more broadly in the Republican Party, or is that less of a concern? And how do we bring everyone together that we need to make it easier

Jason Bordoff: to build lots of energy.

Senator Alan Armstrong: I don't think it's a major concern within the legislative body. As long as people aren't being asked to subsidize the renewables, I don't think that that is. I don't see that as barring any legislation. And my argument to people that raise that, that say, well, we're not going to do anything on this because your administration is being such obstructionist around wind and solar and therefore we're not going to do anything. And my argument is this is going to go on forever. Now is your time to legislate. If you don't want this to happen in the future, now's the time to legislate that you have the power to legislate the problem that you're complaining about. Why don't we get on and do this? We've both seen both sides of this, oil and gas side seen this. Renewables have seen this. I can't imagine that we don't think it makes sense to come up with law right now that disarms that.

Bill Loveless: So what's success look like? By January, a bill would be won or new law. But if you want to keep the ball moving forward, what does that look like?

Senator Alan Armstrong: Yeah, I mean, I think the safest thing is that we'll see a bill drop out of EPW and enr, the Environmental Public Works Committee and Energy Natural Resources Committee that will see a bill drop out from those four. So that's Shelley Moore, Capital chair of epw, Sheldon Whitehouse's ranking member in epw and then. And Mike Lee, Senator Lee as chair for enr, and Martin Heinrich as the ranking members. So those four, I think a lot of weight is on their shoulders to produce a bill and I'm very hopeful that they will do that. I think we've been clear and the industry's been clear within the details in our bill about the kind of things that are required. And I'm hopeful that those are delivered on within the work that they're doing. But I think that's the best path. And whether that gets dropped for Senate goes on recess here is kind of what people like myself are chewing their fingernails off over right now. But that's my hope. As proud as I am of the work that my team did on creating, I think, a very comprehensive bill, I would like nothing more than that to be an article on the shelf and let them actually come up with a bill that'll go regular way through to get on the floor and so that's what I'm hoping for at this point.

Bill Loveless: Well, I know the clock's ticking and you got a lot of work to do, so I really appreciate how generous you've been with your time. And it's really valuable to see people with such significant leadership experience coming to spend time in public service. So thank you for your service.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Thank you very much, Jason. Nice spending time with you today.

Jason Bordoff: Thank you again, Senator Alan Armstrong. And thanks to all of you for listening to this episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. The show is brought to you by the center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. The show is hosted by me, Jason Bordof, and by Bill Loveless. Mary Catherine o', Connor, Caroline Pittman and Q. Lee produced the show. Gregory Villefrank engineered the show. For more information about about the podcast or the center on Global Energy Policy, please visit us online at energypolicy Columbia Edu or follow us on social media, olumbiayou Energy. And please, if you feel inclined, give us a rating on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us out. Thanks again for listening.

Bill Loveless: We'll see you next week.

Senator Alan Armstrong: Sam.